While you here do snoring lie,
Ariel to Gonzalo as Antonio and Sebastian plot Gonzalo’s murder, The Tempest.
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off slumber and beware.
Awake, awake!
Category: Ancestral Dreams
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Ariel
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Shadows
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
– Abraham Lincoln -
Paul Caponigro on Nature
To penetrate and record, even if only reflectively through an idea-image, that which takes place in, over, under, around, and through mature, is to feel the intangible, the somewhere in-between, the what is and the what I am, the interaction between visible and invisible. This is what I look for – what I am interested in. I am concerned with what grows out of interaction.
…
Photography’s potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
…
Who has the time today, really the time, to grow, to unfold, and develop in an activity or even to contemplate properly what others are doing? Life ought to be lived more like harmonious music. The pressure of hastening things, of skimming superficially, only destroys that sense of music in life.
Paul Caponigro, Aperture magazine, spring 1967 -
All the same
I belong to this earth.
Bill Neidjie, Gagudju Man
Soon my bones become earth … all the same.
My spirit has gone back to this country … my mother.
Now my children got to hang on to this story …
I hang on to this story all my life.
My children can’t lose it.
This law,
This country,
This people,
All the same…
Gagudju
Photo: Mark Lang
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Japanese Maple
When did you ever see
Clive James, from Japanese Maple
So much sweet beauty
as when fine rain falls
On that small tree -
Earth Presses Against Us
We write our names with crimson mist!
Mahmoud Darwish, from Earth Presses Against Us
We end the hymn with our flesh.
Here we will die. Here, in the final passage.
Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees. -
Remember me
In summer’s dream-filled light one sound
Gwen Harwood, from Anniversary
echoed through all the whispering
galleries of green: Remember me. -
Country is self
“Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.”
Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country’ -
The Forest
The Forest
Maria Polydouri
look, all around you
the embrace of the Night.
Redolent of intoxicating scents,
it sighs from the nightingale.
The moon above it
is strangely emerging
and in the mirror of the river
lays down her magic. -
Minor White
“If you could stop the shouting of your own voice in your ears, you might be able to hear the small voice of… a pine cone in the sun.”
– Minor White (via David Ward) -
Part of the landscape
“Being part of the landscape is the mystery, the richness of its paradox. The landscape is in me and I am in the landscape.”
John Olson -
Is there any reason…
“Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it, than on the day we came?… If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet; if we can accept a role of steward and depart from the role of the conqueror, if we can accept that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole, then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull, uniform and largely artificial world.”
Olegas Truchanas -
Anton Chekhov
“These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.”
Anton Chekhov -
Biblical
“All her ways are pleasant, and all her paths are peaceful. She is a tree of life to those who embrace her, and those who lay hold of her are blessed.”
Proverbs 3:17-18“God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Genesis 2:9 -
A thousand stories
We all have just one story to tell, and we tell it a thousand ways.
Sally Mann paraphrasing Elizabeth Strout‘You will have only one story,’ she had said. ‘You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.’
Elizabeth Strout, from My Name is Lucy Barton -
Ombra mai fù
Frondi tenere e belle
del mio platano amato
per voi risplenda il fato.
Tuoni, lampi, e procelle
non v’oltraggino mai la cara pace,
né giunga a profanarvi austro rapace.
Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,
soave più.Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never disturb your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.
Never was a shade
of any plant
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.From Serse by George Frideric Handel.
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Paul Kelly
We are shelves, we are
Paul Kelly, from Mushrooms
Tables, we are meek
We are edible
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves
Our kind multiplies
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth
Our foot’s in the door -
Ode to a Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
…
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Stanzas 1 and 6 -
Into the Wild
Somebody left the gate open
LP (Laura Pergolizzi), PJ Bianco
You know we got lost on the way
Come save us a runaway train
Gone insane